In the Cayman Islands, long the beacon of offshore finance, the many thousands of hedge funds domiciled there are fleeing to respectable onshore havens, where they hope newly emboldened regulators will look at them more approvingly.

The island of Jersey, another tax haven grandee, is now thinking the unthinkable: raising taxes, to stave off a fiscal deficit. Its economy was for years dependent on financial services, but the financial crisis struck and more familiar, onshore ways to sustain an economy will have to be imposed.

Is it time to sound the death knoll for tax havens? Will the combination of economic crisis and direct action by onshore governments spell the end of these treasure isles, making life that much tougher for their willing clients in banking and finance?

No, it is not the end, merely a prelude to the next time offshore capitalism returns.

For what we are witnessing now in the tax haven world is a great reconfiguration of these hidden conduits of finance and ownership that appropriate and preserve wealth; passageways of financial power that will, as sure as night follows day, spur global capitalism on to another so-called golden age some 10, 15 years hence.

This is not prophecy, simply a lesson from history.

Modern tax havens were themselves born out of the financial crises of the late 19th century, and took off as depression-struck nations set up barriers to trade and international finance.

Tax havens germinate in the gaps between nations and act as renegade links that reconnect and empower business and finance, often by trailblazing new, riskier forms of finance and business-making that would not be acceptable onshore.

In turn, the financial alchemy worked offshore is turned against onshore regulations until the onshore dam is burst and offshore finance retakes the high ground of mainstream money-making.

Tax havens have fulfilled this function many times in the past, most recently from the 1970s, when nations' financial controls were eaten away by international finance that had slipped the leash of onshore regulation.

The financial crisis of 2008 was the end point of a 40-year pummelling of such controls.

In that time, just about every significant financial transaction in banking and business had an offshore component, and many had no onshore component to them at all, such as the deals undertaken by British banks to game the tax rebate system.

2008 was the moment the offshore world fully merged with the onshore world, making both worlds practically indistinguishable from each other.

Global finance had turned into one giant tax haven, where risky transactions were concocted and kept hidden away from regulators and counterparties, and where deregulation and complex financial products went dancing hand in hand into a toxic twilight.

Yet all these failures – for many years seen as risks intrinsic only to tax havens – were part and parcel of mainstream banking and finance in 2008, not something that had gone badly but exceptionally wrong in Grand Cayman or the Isle of Man.

Curiously, in the never-ending stream of material published on the financial crisis, the role that tax havens played in mediating the deep fault lines of the global economy is only mentioned, if at all, as a footnote.

Isn't it remarkable that these little countries and islands that have traded financial secrecy for survival also managed to keep themselves hidden from the big economic questions that face us?

The untold story of the financial crisis and its aftermath is how tax havens and their clients will find gaps in the new financial regulatory order, and begin the job of firing up the economy anew.

The demand for risk-taking, financial innovation and growth will come soon enough and will be politically directed as the means to give citizens what they inevitably always want: the credit needed for endless consumption.

To that end, new offshore centres will emerge – the bets are already on Malta, Mauritius and the Seychelles – as trailblazers for the second coming of offshore capitalism, and they will give those hungry for profit and inordinate wealth a margin of risk and reward not available in the slumbering onshore world.

The outcome we know already: offshore capitalism will destroy our economies in a repeat performance of all that we have witnessed these last few years.

But this need not happen; the economic gods have not determined our fate. With the removal of tax havens and offshore finance from the world, we can safely and securely build a new onshore polis. The responsibility is ours. We can and must determine our own fate.